Anthony Krafft

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the great-great-uncle, the Geneva architect of historicism, see Antoine Krafft .

Anthony Krafft (born November 16, 1928 in Lausanne , † July 16, 1991 in Pully ) was a Swiss architecture journalist and publisher .

The offspring from a middle-class family, son of a surgeon and university professor, was already married at the age of 19 and with a high school diploma and was a father of a family, the relationship with his parents broke off. First he worked as a journalist for the daily newspaper Gazzette de Lausanne , where he reported on various topics. In the early 1950s he was also the manager of the Lumière cinema in Renens . As a journalist he got to know Jean-Jacques Huber, who later became the publisher of the architecture magazine construction , in whose founding he participated together with Marc-Joseph Saugey and whose editor he was from number four (under the name Architecture, Formes, Fonctions , 1954-71). With this magazine, the autodidact brought together the most important representatives of art and architecture of the era and region, but also many internationally known names: Richard Neutra , Oscar Niemeyer , Pier Luigi Nervi , Gerrit Rietveld , Dariush Borbor . He was also able to understand his work politically, when after the catastrophic flooding in Florence in 1966 work only got off to a slow start and preventive measures were not taken, he threw the authority of the architects and town planners represented in his paper into the balance and organized together with Giovanni Michelucci held an international conference in Florence, as a result of which the necessary security measures for the old town could be organized. Where , manifesto via firenze ' participated Peter Smithson , Georges Candilis , Jacob Bakema , Lúcio Costa and Heikki Sirén . He also tried to save the Kenwin Villa in La Tour-de-Peilz , which was then threatened with demolition, and to develop it into a meeting and art center. In 1972 he founded the magazine as - Architecture Suisse and in 1979 the architecture contemporaine collection .

literature

• Armand Brulhart, Catherine Courtiau: Anthony Krafft. In: Isabelle Rucki and Dorothee Huber (eds.): Architectural Lexicon of Switzerland - 19./20. Century. Birkhäuser, Basel 1998. ISBN 3-7643-5261-2 . P. 320
• François Neyroud: Homage to Anthony Krafft . November 16, 1928 - June 16, 1991. In: Ingénieurs et architectes suisses . tape 118 , no. 1/2 , 1992, pp. 14-15 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-77733 .